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Nehnisa is seven years old. Her dark curls are cropped close to her scalp, the culprit being a recent outbreak of lice in the servants’ quarters. Mademoiselle Yvaine in the kitchens mourns this loss greatly. Nehnisa knows this because Mlle Yvaine takes great pride in appearances, for a lady so often covered in flour. She washes her hands as ritual, a prayer, ardent in her cleanliness.
Nehni likes to observe little habits like this. Verain, the pock-faced stable boy, feeds his breadcrusts to birds, no matter how much his stomach rumbles. Where some would watch, Monsieur Colart touches, running fingers along banisters and cupboards - as much searching for dust as sensation. Tatie Lauma jingles keys in her idleness. Mamie Myriani licks her lips before she speaks, tracing the wrinkles in her skin. Josset clicks his teeth when he is displeased. Monsieur Garnot picks his nose when no one is watching, but Nehni sees anyway.
Her mother, Shora, is employed in the estate of the D'Arche family. Minor, landless nobles descended from the bastard line of Isidore D'Arlesans, Duke of Arlesans in the Exalted Age. The Comtesse says everything about the past, my grand history , like this. Or, perhaps said.
Nehni runs without the weight of her status, ducking and weaving between the members of her family, bustling like bees in the combs Garnot had shown her once. Le Coin! And she dodges Josset marching around the corner with a fully loaded tea tray, skipping past him with a wry smile as he recovers and clacks his teeth together.
The Comtesse, the dowager lady of the house, is dead ; buried as of the day before. Maman says in any other noble house, they'd pretend to be sad, at least, but it's well known the new Comte disliked his mother just as much as everyone else.
“He likes honesty,” says Colart, “Frankness.”
Mlle Yvaine had waved a ladle in the air and laughed when Nehni asked.
"You'll see." She smiled, and the skin around her eyes crinkled, genuine.
"The Comte has aged,” She said with great confidence, for a servant talking of a nobleman,
“But I know he will not have changed at all."
Comtesse Mathilde D'Arche was a bitter old bat to the very end. Nehni remembers peering from behind her mother's skirt at the big woman, rendered small in her illness, only to be spat at.
" Little shit." Her voice creaked like the bones of the house in the cold months. Nehni clutched at the coarse linen.
"I do not care if you are mine, and she is yours, girl. Keep your spawn from my chambers. You are bad enough. Would that we could afford all human staff, ah, if my father could see how far we have fallen."
Comtesse Mathilde had hated elves, hated children, and hated elven children the most. But the Comtesse is dead and buried, Andrasteblesshereternalsoulletherbeatpeace and Nehni is free to skip in the grand hall, without Maman or Colart sweeping into the room and making her stop. Or making her read instead ( which was much worse. ) Maman says reading and writing is important. Nehni hates ink-stained hands, and her fingers ache. Colart says she should try for her Maman, because Maman has tried very hard for her, whatever that means.
The Grand Hall, built for Valmont balls, is not particularly Grand after all. The only land the D'Arche have is their (small) estate, and the Château is outdated, despite years of both desperate and loving repair. The Grand Hall is really only large enough for a gathering of thirty, if that. A far cry from those most noble families host. Nehni has never been anywhere else, but Colart says he and Maman have been everywhere .
Still, the hall has never been used in Nehni's lifetime - Comtesse D'Arche had given up hosting when her eldest son had entered the Academie, twelve years prior.
( "Ah, the whelp," she would utter with disdain if anything arrived from Val Royeaux).
Normally, there is a layer of dust. The staff can afford to put off cleaning the hall, the lady having been bedbound and with no hope of marching through the halls, inspecting the place as she had when Nehni was very very little .
Today, the floor is polished. Nehni's woolen socks can't find purchase, and a bold skip turns into a bold slip. Instinctually, she thrusts her arms out in front of her, and for her trouble finds no reward, landing hard on the floor with a bang.
Her palms smart.
Nehnisa is little, and today there is no Comtesse to hear and shout herself hoarse at Colart to remove the little creature, no Maman to plead silence, no Mlle Yvaine to pat her head with a rough hand and bribe with a spoon of honey; so Nehni sniffs and rubs at her nose, and she cries.
Nehni cries and cries, and her cheeks are hot and her knees hurt and her hands sting and she is never allowed to cry about anything for long at all and she feels small and her feelings are very big and everyone is busy and nobody has time for her and nobody is telling her off but nobody is holding her either and most especially, Maman is not here.
So Nehni cries, oblivious to her surroundings, to the volume of her pain.
A pair of painstakingly polished brown boots dance their way across the room behind her. A gloved hand taps her on the shoulder and Nehnisa flinches something awful, and then scoots around and looks up. And up. And up.
Where she expected Colart, or one of the other men (but their boots would never be so nice, really) is a human man. A noble. And he is wearing the D'Arche mask, a theatrical grimace, with a mouth decorated at either end with spirals like flourishes on a carved bow. Comtesse Mathilde hadn't often worn hers, with no invitations or occasions, but the heraldry is everywhere around the Château.
She stops crying fast.
For a second, they just stare at each other. Nehni waits for her admonishment. Maman made sure she wasn't stupid, sure that she knew the consequences if guests , few as they were, saw how she behaved. Saw her at all.
It doesn't come. The masked man just stands there, frozen, and slowly retracts his gloved hand.
"Pardonnes-moi, petit mademoiselle." He recovers and bows with a flourish of his hand.
"I was looking for a quiet place, but it seems this room is occupied."
Nehni chews on that for a second, thinking, and then looks at the nobleman in the mask and speaks.
"It is, but I can leave, Ser. I was looking for Maman." She says, and then when he keeps looking at her wistfully, she panics and adds, "And playing ," honesty is best, Colart says. Nonsense, says Maman. Lauma tells them both off for preaching to a girl what they won’t do themselves.
The mask doesn't move, and Nehni scrabbles for purchase on the floor, remembering her position. Then, the man behind it lets out a puff of air, almost like a laugh, and puts his hand on his hip.
"A troublemaker then, and definitely not the first to grace these halls. I think I know who your Maman is, shall we find her together?" He goes to offer her his hand and then seemingly thinks better of it. He pauses, removes the pristine white glove from his fingers, and renews the offer. Nehni isn’t sure this is better than him being angry.
Nehni reaches up and grasps the calloused, brown-skinned hand and allows the man to pull her up. Maman had said after the Comtesse spat so long ago, “Sometimes we must be compliant with the requests of our betters.”
Thus Nehni stands, and then he says—
"Now, our mission is to find your Maman, and I'm sure you'd accomplish it swiftly and efficiently without my company." He intones, false-pensive. His other hand goes to the place on a mask a goatee might be, scratching absently.
"But , I wouldn't be a very honourable man if I let an injured Lady of Arlesans go unaided." His voice takes on an unplaceable tone all of a sudden, and he abruptly leans and scoops her into his arms, too fast for her to protest. He holds her upright, and maneuvers her onto his shoulders, and says,
"Hold fast, petit madame." Guiding her hands around his neck, he sets off at a steady pace, but faster than she'd be able to keep up with, even with her little-deer-legs. Long and graceful. Long and grace less .
She links her hands, and he dances between rooms. Nehni is trying very hard to be apprehensive about this but can't contain her laughter. The nobleman laughs too, some hearty, deep thing she can feel echoing from her place perched on his shoulders.
He flings doors open with abandon, and when they reach the long hall that leads to the other wing of the house, where the Comtesse's rooms are— were, he runs. They speed down the hall, and when she cranes her neck to look behind them, she sees his boots have left a trail of muddy footsteps following them, marking the Comtesse's prized hall runner.
He slows as they pass the Lady's bedroom, but the door is open, and she isn't there. Of course she wouldn't be. The nobleman doesn't stop walking, but he looks to that room as they go past. This hallway is odd, without her here. Nehni isn’t sure what to think of this nobleman, but if he thinks nothing of the hall-runner, might he be as bad as the Comtesse? It might be worse to have a man of the house who can run the halls.
In the last days, the Comtesse would lilt:
courez, petit lapin, courez,
Her voice had filled the halls, its urgency profound and unsettling. Little rabbits everywhere, Shora! Do you see them? Get the gardener! Tell my husband! Her vivacity in those last days had rattled the staff. For the first time in years, the Comtesse had tried to climb from her bed, speaking of her long abandoned social calendar, of the husband they were hiding from her. The rabbits loose in her chambers, ruining her good name.
Colart had gently taken Nehni aside, when it became scary. He had crouched at her level, and had spoken of how sometimes the very old are suddenly very young, and could think only of things long past. It was no comfort to her, nor to the Comtesse who all the same would sing,
courez, petit lapin, courez.
Nehnisa had known then that she, Maman, Colart, Lauma, Myriani, Yvaine, Josset, Verain, were the lapin . Rabbits are small, fast, and nervous. Rabbits are tasty, but Nehni has seen Monsieur Garnot carry one limp in his hands through the grounds.
“Picking at the garden beds.” He had said disdainfully, eyeing Nehni. The Comtesse hadn’t known how right she was.
Nehni is small and thinking, always thinking. Nehni thinks: if a rabbit is a food, if a rabbit is a pest, and my family are all rabbits, what does that make us?
The nobleman slows further, and as they reach the end of the hall and the door to the drawing-room, he lifts her off of his shoulders and deposits her gently, next to him.
The nobleman turns, and looks at the carnage of the hall runner and laughs again, and then raps on the door of the drawing room with his knuckles; thrice in quick succession.
A nobleman doesn't knock. He is announced, she knows. So Nehni stands up straight, puffs out her chest, and says in her best impression of Colart: "Presenting his Grace!" Loudly.
And then gets stuck because she doesn't know his name.
He takes her hand, squeezes it gently, and then announces himself.
"Presenting his lordship , myself, Comte Cassin Isidore D'Arche." He corrects, in a faux-deep voice.
He turns the handle and steps boldly into the drawing room, where her mother is perched on a chaise lounge. Maman's hair is pulled back from her face, but in a more complex style than she usually does. She is wearing the kind of dress the tailor brings to show to the dead-comtesse when he visits.
Maman smiles, all teeth, none of the demure one she shows the Comtesse when she's particularly angry and restraining the urge to stomp on a foot. Mlle Yvaine calls that a goat-smile.
"I see you've failed to introduce yourself, Milord." Pointed, purposeful, and dagger-sharp like all of the words her mother says. The Comte, who is holding her hand, seems to realize what her mother refers to and brings his free hand up to remove the artful grimace that is the D'Arche mask.
"Quite right, my lady."
And he reveals a reflection of Nehni. Darker-eyed, a soft hazel as opposed to the hawkish yellow she shares with her mother. The rest is all him, she can see now. He isn't particularly young or old, and his brown skin is marred in places by small scars, nicks, and cuts aplenty. His hair is longer than hers, pulled back into a ponytail, and the curls hang longer with the weight of it, but they share that warm, deep brown. All that and—
"Your eyebrows need plucking," comes out of Nehni’s mouth bluntly, so much like Maman and yet not at all the same. Those brows furrow, the Comte, her father , gingerly touching at his face.
"Also, quite right." He sighs, and suddenly he's poking back at her mother, not needle-sharp, but poking nonetheless. "Had I'd known you'd raise a perfect replica of yourself, my dear, I would have visited more."
"You wouldn't have." Bit back Maman, jokingly, "Take note, Nehnisa, that nothing scares a noble Chevalier like his own mother."
"The biggest fear would be his wife."
"A wife he risks losing if he criticizes her again."
"Point taken, mon loup ." He turns back to Nehni, and he stares again .
He bends and lifts her hands to his mouth, kisses the back of them, twice each.
“Nehnisa, mon bichette. I’ll be here now. Your Papa is here. ”
My wolf. My little deer. All teeth, all stumbling legs. All animal.
Rabbit , says a little voice in that creaking, lilting intonation.
The verbal ripostes cease, and her father, the new Comte, perches at the side of her mother, and she crawls into his lap.
Maman reaches for Nehni's hair, tucks one of the longer strands behind her ear, and says,
“A shame you didn’t come sooner, love.”
"Curse those lice," her Maman had said, trimming at her curls with shears